pfdietz

Common Lisp isn't image based. I mean, you can store images (although that's not a standardized thing), but that's normally what's done. In the normal workflow code is in files that are compiled and loaded into a running image; changes are made to the files and then they are recompiled as needed (using dependencies between the files to do only the files that have to be recompiled/reloaded).

> Renewables (solar, wind) alone are not alternative to nuclear, without energy storage.

So... ok? Why exactly would this be an issue? Is there some reason to consider just renewables without storage? That would be like trying to argue nuclear is useless because it also needs transmission.

That may be the case, but it doesn't explain why neutrinos would be essential for intergalactic communication. Maybe the person I was responding to didn't realize neutrinos travel very close to the speed of light, not infinitely fast?

(Title is my clickbaiting)

From the link:

"The main way that people publicly interact with the site now is to advertise their AI-generated proofs, often without any attempt to explain them, but as a way to record a (increasingly meaningless) priority claim.

This is very different to what I imagined, and I don't want to manage a website which does this."

That doesn't make any sense. Photons would work much better.

And remember, the "speed of light in the medium" depends on the wavelength of the light. This is why prisms separate light by color.

For solar, seasonality would be best addressed by thermal storage, which I mention here frequently.

This is being pursued most interestingly by Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" approach. They've updated their web page to include a few more technical details, which look to make sense economically (for example, they're putting the resistive heater(s) outside the dirt piles where it/they can be easily maintained).

The round trip efficiency (RTE) might be 40%, which is actually not bad since the input power (crude DC direct from solar modules) is quite cheap, not needing inverters or a grid connection sized to that DC power. Thermal losses are < 1%/month.

The technology would work down to a scale of about 100 kW average power, which is quite small all considered. Good for village-scale microgrids or individual small industrial enterprises. Scaling up, the average power would be similar to that of a large earthen dam of the same size, only the dirt would be used for to hold heat, not hold back water in a river, and could be sited almost anywhere. Heat retention improves as the size scales up; a dirt pile of the size of the largest dams, if it had been built and heated in the Bronze Age, would still be hot inside.

France has legacy nuclear plants because of history and inertia. If they were forced to start from scratch today it wouldn't make sense to build nuclear plants, they're not competitive (and France can't build them effectively now.) Flamanville 3 was a fiasco.

If the coffin needed any more nails, this puts the final kibosh on that cancelled SMR project out there that centered on Utah and Idaho, the one involving NuScale. Geothermal makes much more sense for them now.

There's a geothermal project at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon that also looks interesting (different people doing that).

Dry and high altitude increase the performance because those increase the amount of sunlight hitting the ground. The effect of temperature would be on top of those effects.

Cold actually increases PV output.

The government likes to get in front of a parade and pretend they are leading it.

There's a new strategy for treating loss of photoreceptors in the retina: reprogram fibroblasts with optogenetics to turn them into new photoreceptors. NEJM just had an article on this.

JIT compilers are essentially producing self-modifying programs (or, indeed, dynamically loaded libraries).

Dynamic languages, like Common Lisp, where things can be redefined at run time likely require modification of running code to achieve high efficiency (the alternative is to just leave a general mechanism in place and accept the runtime overhead and loss of optimization opportunities from that.)

> penny wise and pound foolish

I love this saying. The general problem, optimizing the wrong metric, shows up all over the place.

In a post-fossil fuel age, the problem becomes obtaining carbon atoms in usable forms. Biomass (or, waste streams ultimately derived from biomass) would seem to be a good source for this, although not in quantities sufficient to replace the fossil fuels being burned for energy. The amount of carbon needed for chemicals and materials is much smaller.

This doesn't mean the biomass would be directly used; rather it could be converted to chemical feedstocks that could be purified just as petroleum and natural gas are fractionated, reformed, and purified to make such things. The outputs ultimately obtained might be little different from today's fossil fuel-based chemicals and materials.

A lot of consumption is social signalling, sending the message "look! I can afford this!"

Maybe we should recast frugality as "financial edging". Think about buying something but refrain so that when you do finally give in the rush is enhanced.

I assume the stop-motion studio's troubles were because everyone has moved on to CGI.

The author is obviously not a big fan.

We have lots of agricultural land; too much, actually. This is a side effect of the green revolution.

AIs have representations of the training data, but they also do search. Search creates new knowledge. For example, a chess program doesn't have a representation of all chess games, but can search and in doing so create new games. This isn't (just) random generation, but generation constrained by an evaluation function.

It's not clear current what the human benefit of current mathematics is. Can people figure out what's important?

Is there a replacement now for 23andMe?

That was the most reasonable interpretation of what I was responding to.

A key enabling technology for this is long term thermal storage, which I've been emphasizing here. It is claimed to work on a scale of ~100 kW or higher, storing heat at 600 C with losses less than 1% per month and capex of $0.10 per kWh-th of storage capacity. This is very well suited for isolated microgrids.

> Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.

Or, convert the solar energy to heat, then back to electricity at 40% round trip efficiency. Needs only 2.5x the solar (or less, because some solar goes directly to the users without long term storage). The heat is very storable at scale, even for seasonal storage.

So you can have large single points of failure? Makes no sense.

Maybe you meant invest in nuclear weapons.

I trace some of this to 9/11. Before that, religion may have seemed innocuous, but that brought out how dangerous it can be. Subsequent political hypocrisy only reinforced that. I am not surprised outright atheism is on the rise in the US.

I thought the foundation of civilization was killing people who didn't conform.

Incoming: lots of new people paid to be submitters.

I wonder what funding agencies are going to say about this.